Three of the four Americans looked out into the press conference room wide-eyed and still.

From the look on their collective faces, it was clear they were both tired from racing, and were in a situation they had never experienced before. Only Piedmont's Scott Gault, the veteran of the group, and the only one who had ever been to an Olympics, seemed ready and relaxed.

Beside them to their right were eight of the most senior and most decorated rowing Olympians competing in the 2012 London Olympic Games in the men’s four. Among the British crew alone – Alex Gregory, Pete Reed, Tom James and Andrew Triggs Hodge – there were 14 international medals, including nine world titles, three of them Olympic gold from the same event in 2008.

But there they were this afternoon, Gault, 28, (Piedmont, Calif.), Charlie Cole, 25, (New Canaan, Conn.), Henrik Rummel, 24, (Pittsford, N.Y.) and Glenn Ochal, 25, (Philadelphia, Pa.) on the same dais, with Olympic bronze medals around their necks.

They came into the Olympics a new lineup, without an international medal among them, or an international race as a crew, and they had just run with the best in the world to claim the third Olympic rowing medal for the United States at this Games.

And they were talking about the future.

“Certainly I think people have to be excited about the work we’ve put in,” said Cole. “We put in a lot of hard work since last year. We’re young guys and we have a lot to look forward to and we’ll have to think about and reflect on our performance and let the dust settle. But we have a lot to be confident about, and hopefully, a lot to look forward to in our rowing careers.”

It was a perfect finish to a week of rowing that ended an Olympic quadrennial for the United States with three medals and gains in many events that speaks of promise for the next four years and the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The bronze medal in the four was the first for the U.S. since 1992. The women’s eight continued its dominance with back-to-back Olympic gold medals and a seventh consecutive world title. And the women’s quad took bronze for the first medal in the event since 1984, when it was a one-thousand-meter, coxed-boat event.

The rest of the numbers speak for themselves:

Of the 44 athletes in the U.S. contingent, 17 left London with medals, 30 rowed in the finals, and 11 missed the podium by tenths of a second – 0.2 in the women’s pair and 0.3 in the men’s eight, a boat that had not qualified at the 2011 World Rowing Championships. There were some ups and downs, the men’s quad faltered in the repechage and finished out of the finals, and men’s single sculler, Ken Jurkowski (New Fairfield, Conn.), was forced to withdraw for medical reasons.

In the lightweight women’s double sculls, Livermore's Julie Nichols and Kristin Hedstrom (Concord, Mass.) finished 11th overall Saturday.

“I’m proud of all the effort we put in, all the hard work we’ve done, working on this,” said Nichols. “It’s definitely not the outcome we were hoping for or looking for.”